It is there to force a fuse to blow or a circuit breaker or GFCI to trip if a fault condition occurs in any appliances, their flexible cords or plugs that are connected into the circuit.
By carrying away the excess current in a fault condition - which should cause the protecting fuse to blow or circuit breaker to trip - the "ground" or "earth" wire protects the building and its occupants because the power should be cut off before anyone gets electrocuted or any overloaded circuit wiring or appliances catch on fire.
The neutral is the normal "return" wire: in systems where the load is supplied from only one hot (or "live") wire, the neutral completes the circuit and carries current back from the load to the power station.
All the neutral and ground (or "earth") wires in a building are tied or linked together at the incoming service main breaker panel. This is the only place they should ever be tied togetherbecause it is "upstream" of all the fuses and/or circuit breakers protecting the hot (or "live") wires for the various circuits installed in the building.
Warning: we must never assume that a neutral is safe to touch: it has to be checked with a voltmeter or a voltage indicator to be sure it is not "live". This is because a neutral wire is designed to carry current under normal circumstances.
So, if a neutral wire going back to the incoming main breaker panel has not been properly connected - or suffers a deliberate disconnection or some accidental damage which causes it to break - then it and any neutral wires connected to it further downstream will go live up to the break because of being connected to the downstream loads which still have hot feeds coming into them!
That is why we should never use a neutral as a substitute for a proper, separate, ground or "earth" wire.
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If some external accidental damage or electrical breakdown of the wiring's insulation occurred anywhere to the house wiring, to a socket outlet or to an appliance, these things could be very dangerous if there was no such protective wire.
For example, if there was no protective ground or earth wire, a fault could happen that is of a kind which did NOT draw enough extra current to blow a fuse or make the main circuit breakers on the incoming supply panel "trip" to cut the current off - but the wiring could still catch on fire and/or someone could be electrocuted!
Neutral wires are the return paths to the power generation station for current it supplies to the house or building via single live or "hot" wires in the branch circuits.
For more information please click on the Related Questions below.
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Earth (also called protective ground or ground) and Neutral are normally both near 0 volts to ground potential. The neutral service wire is designed to carry current and the "ground" or "earth" wire is designed so that it should carry no current unless there is a fault.
In North American 120 volt single-phase services, earth and neutral are connected together at each service entry and connected to the earth by a stake in the ground or other reliable grounding means. They are not connected at any other point inside the building. The neutral wire ends at the transformer near the building and does not connect back - via the distribution lines - to the power utility company's generating station(s).
In North American Electrical Engineering and code, the terms "neutral" and "ground" are not officially used. The formal term for neutral is the "grounded" conductor and the term for the earth or ground connection is the "grounding" conductor. Since these are easily confused, it is more common to use the terms neutral and ground.
In North America a 240/120 volt so-called "split single-phase service" from a center-tapped 240/120 volt utility service transformer is often used for major home appliances - such as ovens, ranges, water heaters, clothes washing machines and driers, air conditioning units, etc. - which take a high power draw.
They work as follows: the main heaters and/or motors run on 240 volts single-phase delivered from two "hot" wires. (Usually one hot is colored red and the other hot is colored black.)
If they include some low-power devices - such as time clocks, wash-cycle programmers, etc. - that only need 120 volts, the current for them is delivered from one of the above-mentioned red or black "hot" wires. A separate wire called a "neutral", which is normally colored white, is used to send the current from those small 120 volt devices back to the center-tap on the 240/120 volt service transformer.
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As always, if you are in doubt about what to do, the best advice anyone should give you is to call a licensed electrician to advise what work is needed.
Before you do any work yourself,
on electrical circuits, equipment or appliances,
always use a test meter to ensure the circuit is, in fact, de-energized.
IF YOU ARE NOT ALREADY SURE YOU CAN DO THIS JOB
SAFELY AND COMPETENTLY
REFER THIS WORK TO QUALIFIED PROFESSIONALS.
You can measure a small voltage between earth and neutral, even if the neutral is grounded to earth, because the neutral conductor acts as an antenna picking up electromagnetic radiation in the atmosphere. -------------------------- If the above answer were true, the earth conductor would also act as an antenna. But the real answer is, if you read ANY voltage between the neutral and earth, the neutral is broken somewhere between where you are measuring and the panel or not properly bonded in the panel. Call a competent electrician to repair the problem.
earth has living creatures on it......obviously
If the phase and neutral wires are shorted together, the voltage in the neutral wire will be the same as the phase voltage. This is because the short circuit effectively bypasses any impedance or resistance in the circuit, causing the potential difference between the phase and neutral wires to be equal.
Ideally ground and neutral should be at the same potential, but as there is current in the neutral wire and no current (normally) in the ground wire there can be a difference. I have personally measured over 25 VAC on the neutral relative to ground in some systems.
A hurricane is a storm. A earthquake is movement of the earth.
Your question should read, 'Why does a neutral have zero potential?' 'Voltage' means 'potential difference', and you cannot have a potential difference at a single point. A neutral doesn't necessarily have zero potential although it is connected to earth (ground). This is because the potential of earth isn't literally zero; it's just considered to be zero, in the same way that sea level is considered to be zero in terms of height. Furthermore, there is often a voltage drop between the neutral and earth -in which case, the potential of the neutral can be several volts higher than the potential of earth.
1.6749x10-24
In a typical residential situation there is 220 to 240 volts between the two hot wires that are typically red and black and 110 to 120 volts between neutral and either black or red. The voltage between neutral and earth should be zero.
The difference between neutron are neutral, and electrons have a negative change too them. Neutron is a neutral particle that exists in the nucleus of an atom. The year when the neutron was founded was 1932.
As i know,neutral is the return path of current & ground is for any leakage current
Neutral-earthing reactors or Neutral grounding reactors are connected between the neutral of a power system and earth to limit the line-to-earth current to a desired value under system earth fault conditions.
Quality of the earth pit needs to be checked and enhanced. Check the continuity of the earth bus/ conductor, check for improper joints in the earth bus / conductor and correct it. Earth resistance will reduce and the voltage difference between neutral and earth will also reduce. Check also for the loose or floating neutral and correct it.
You really should be asking why the potential of neutral is zero. 'Voltage' means 'potential difference' which, by definition, cannot exist at at point. The reason is that the neutral conductor is earthed (grounded), and earth is, by general consent, considered to have a potential of zero volts. In practise, however, there is usually a small voltage drop between the neutral and earth, so it would be more accurate to say that the neutral's potential is close to zero.
This question is not quite clear but I will try it somehow. The voltage drop between the live and neutral, and live and earth will both be 230v, but the voltage drop between the neutral and earth is almost zero due to the fact that the neutral and earth is basically one conductor split.
A 'voltage' is another name for a potential difference. As the name implies, a potential difference exists between two different points or, in the case of an electrical installation, between the line conductor and the neutral conductor. So the neutral does not 'import voltages'. Voltages exist between the line (hot) conductor and the neutral conductor.
A grounded neutral will be at earth potential. A floating neutral will be at a voltage dependent upon the voltage imbalance between phases, and the design of the transformer.
- protons are positive and neutrons are neutral- a small difference of mass exist